Making dinner, changing light bulbs, and mowing the lawn are common household tasks, but for a person with epilepsy, they all have the potential to be dangerous activities. People with certain types of seizures are more prone to household accidents than others, says Maria A. Guina, MD, a neurologist with…

Epilepsy causes vary from person to person, and sometimes doctors say its origin can be a mystery. Sara Eve Fermin, a 33-year-old poet from Union City, New Jersey, remembers the first time she had a seizure. She was shopping at Gap when she suddenly felt her legs buckle.

Fear of seizing can be disabling, and epilepsy can lead to unemployment, depression, anxiety, and paranoia, Barkan said. While 70 to 75 percent of epilepsy patients' seizures are controlled by medications, the remaining 25 to 30 percent is a large group. Surgery was once viewed as a last resort for…

Since the oil has been illegal it's not immediately available in the state. Gov. Nikki Haley has signed into law a bill allowing people in South Carolina with severe epilepsy to use CBD oil, which comes from the marijuana plant, as a treatment option. The oil must be prescribed by…

A spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) called Empatica, has created a wearable device that monitors epileptic seizures. According to the value of the global mHealth market for 2015 is forecasted to be at around 14.5 billion U.S. dollars. In fact, 247 million people in the US have…

An online contest for data scientists has produced a great leap forward in efforts to predict when someone with epilepsy is going to have a seizure. The winning team used data on electrical activity in the brain to develop an algorithm that predicted seizures 82 percent of the time.

If you have treatment-resistant epilepsy, you may benefit from recent advances in surgical procedures. The newest is a treatment called responsive neurostimulation therapy, which the FDA approved late last year. The treatment can alleviate epilepsy for some patients with partial onset seizures that have not been controlled by two or…

Within a decade, people with drug-resistant epilepsy may be able to take a pill to suppress seizures as required, in a similar way to how we take painkillers to relieve a headache. Around 50 million people have epilepsy worldwide. Of these, about 70% respond positively to anti-epileptic drugs (AEDs).